The Regency as Feminist Utopia

A week or so back I wrote a piece for Salon in which I talked about the way in which self-publishing and ebook erotica has fit into and challenged romance genre themes and conventions. In the discussion, I talked about Janice Radway’s classic 1984 study Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t quite realized how controversial Radway’s study is. Romance readers, it turns out, hate it, arguing that it’s condescending, simplistic, and blinkered in its narrow anthropological focus on one small group of romance readers. They also are infuriated by Radway’s suggestion that romance provides women with a compensatory escape from unsympathetic husbands and lives stifled by patriarchy. Pam Rosenthal added that she was “pissed re use of Radway cuz it ignores a generation of feminist-inflected romance discussion since then.”

In the course of the twitter conversation, Janine Ballard recommended a couple of romance novels that she thought might challenge my view of the genre (and perhaps make me more skeptical of Radway.) Two of the books she suggested (both regency romances) were Cecelia Grant’s “A Lady Awakened” and Pam Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation.” So, having read both (and enjoyed both, with reservations) I thought I’d talk a little about ways in which they do, in fact, seem to dovetail with Radway’s discussion, and ways in which they don’t.

The most intriguing part of Radway’s argument, to me, is her suggestion that romance novels are an expression of a desire for nuturance which, she suggests, is often denied to women in patriarchal society. Using the theories of Nancy Chodorow, Radway argues that romance novels imagine men who, beneath a hard, distant exterior, are actually soft and nurturing. Romantic heroes are mothers in disguise.

Both Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation” and Grant’s “A Lady Awakened” fit this theory surprisingly well. Or at least, both take care to link mothering and romantic love. Grant’s protagonist, Martha Russell, has at the beginning of the novel just lost her drunken husband. Without an heir, her home will go to his brother, known among the servants for having raped multiple housemaids. In order to prevent that, Martha engages Theo Mirkwood, a neighboring sensualist exiled to Sussex by his father, to sleep with her every day in hopes of producing a heir that can be fobbed off as her former husband’s. Theo, then, is not so much a lover as a mother-maker, and Martha’s emotional isolation is specifically tied not just to her lack of love for men, but to her barrenness. Anxieties around mother-child are paired and mirrored in the anxieties around lovers, so that both are solved simultaneously — with Martha able to nurture a child when she finds herself able to allow Theo to nurture her.

The plot of Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation” doesn’t deal with mothering so obviously. But its first scene makes the connection very strongly, as Emilia, the Marquessa of Rowen, bonds with her first baby and simultaneously regrets her husbands lack of affection. In a passage that (given the rest of the text) is pretty clearly supposed to be erotic, Emilia prepares to breastfeed, noting that “She felt the most remarkable sensation in her breasts, which had grown hard, and moist at their tips.” But then a wet nurse comes and takes the baby away, in part so that Emilia will be ready to have another baby (a back-up heir) in short order. “The milk and her tears dried up, and her menses started again a few weeks later.” Again, the thwarting of motherhood and the thwarting of romantic love are linked. Romance means mothering; a loving man becomes loving mother. The delight is in the gender mix-up, as Rosenthal makes clear in a remarkable passage.

Confusion, befuddlement, sweet sea of swirling distraction; she couldn’t tell (didn’t know and obviously was in no position to say) whether she was moving or sensing, doing or done to, lover or beloved or both at once.

Was it possible to be both at once? Could one sort it out, separate the each from the both of them, find the beginning or skip ahead to the ending? While the snake swallowed its tail, beyond words or thought, where there was only the endless circle, the ring of pure light, the blank low sound of ohhhh, words faded to humming, ecstatic spiral of sensation? After heroine and hero have pushed and pulled, teased and taunted, come and gone and come and come again, to this quick, bright, simultaneous and happy confusion, bonds loosed and boundaries no longer distinct? Where does one pick up the story again, the then and now, he and she, lover and beloved?

Radway, paraphrasing Chodorow, argues that romances are based in the fact that women, unlike men, “possess quite permeable ego-boundaries…their adult internal psychic world…is a complex relational constellation that continuously demands the balnce and completion provided by other individuals.” As a description of all women everywhere, that seems pretty reductive, but as a gloss on what’s happening in that passage from Rosenthal, it works nicely. A utopia of pleasure in which ego is lost and relation becomes the self, a “ring of pure light” which seems like it could describe birth as easily as sex, with “boundaries” between selves “no longer distinct.”

Radway tends to see this imagined feminine utopia of love, interrelation, and mothering, as compensatory — it is as a way to escape from an unpleasant patriarchal reality in which men are not caring and women are not nurtured. This, too, could be seen as fitting both Grant and Rosenthal’s books — though in a more consciously feminist vein than Radway proposes. That’s because both authors are quite explicit in presenting love and relation as a solution to, or antidote to, patriarchy.

In “Awakened,” for example, Theo, the wastrel, finds his sense of duty and ambition through his love of Martha — and that sense of duty and ambition makes him, not a masterful hierarchical patriarch, but an egalitarian leader by consensus.

When had he become this man, as easy about command as though he were born to it? He gave respect in extravagant handfuls, never fearing he might diminish his own store — and indeed he did not. The more he deferred to the expertise of others, the farther they would follow him down any path. One could see that in the way people stepped up to undertake this or that part of his plan.

In complement, Martha’s love of Theo leads her out of her widowed isolation; he gets her neighbors to call on her, much to their pleasure and hers. In her troubles he tells her “You have more allies than you know, if you would only learn to trust them” — which is a prelude to the entire community uniting against the dastardly Mr. Russell and forcing him to give up his desire to take possession of Martha’s house. Love is not just an individual troth, but a communal good, which binds men and women, masters and servants, laborers and landowners — and banishes evil, here figured deliberately as the patriarchal monstrosity of the rapist.

“The Slightest Provocation” is just as sweeping. Set in a period of famine and labor unrest in England, the love of Mary and Kit prevents bloodshed and thwarts the British government’s patriarchal schemes to foment revolution in the interest of passing repressive legislation. Mary’s long delayed declaration of passion “My husband, my darling my only love—” is issued as Kit and she are in the middle of an elaborate ruse to dissuade a number of laborers from marching on London, where they will surely be arrested and perhaps eventually hanged. Love saves lives and bridges class — a truth underlined even more emphatically at the end of the novel when we learn that Kit is the illegitimate son of Lady Emilia’s carpenter and worker, Mr. Greenlee. The novel that began with Emilia barren of milk and love ends with her and her long-time working class lover happy in the knowledge that their son, Kit, has found happiness as well.

I’d argue, then, that Rosenthal and Grant don’t contradict Radway’s analysis so much as they complete it. Radway, again, saw the romance as a kind of idealized feminine vision created in the teeth of male reality; a fantasy in which the barren partitions of patriarchy could dissolve in a nurturant bi-gendered relational egolessness. Rosenthal and Grant certainly respond to that vision — but they, like Radway, draw out its political subtext. In these novels, the 19th century setting, portrayed in loving realistic detail, is exciting precisely because its rigid hierarchies are so ripe for overthrow — the patriarchy bending and flowing into sweet, soft communal affection. The purpose of the Regency is to save the Regency for, and with, feminism. If Radway had written romances rather than anthropological treatises, you have to imagine that these are the sorts of romances she would write.
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While I think Radway would love these books, though, I can’t exactly say that I did. Both of them were well-written. Grant in particular, is a masterful stylist. This description of one of Martha and Theo’s first sexual encounters, for example.

Her hands fell at random places on his back and stayed there, passively riding his rhythm like a pair of dead fish tossed by the sea. Or rather, one dead fish. The other still curled tight, like a brittle seashell with its soft sensate creature shrunk all the way inside.

That’s lovely, and also bitingly funny — the sort of thing Jane Austen might have written if she’d been willing to follow her characters into bed. And then there’s this scene, again in bed:

The joke is, she really is obsessed with land management. I laughed out loud at that. Why can’t rom-coms ever have banter that witty? For that matter, why exactly is romance so universally considered to be crap while Elmore Leonard or John LeCarre or J.K. Rowling or for that matter Jonathan Lethem are supposed to be taken seriously? Grant’s prose is better than all those folks’, I’m pretty sure.

At first, as I was zipping through the ebook, I was planning to buy everything Grant had written and read it ravenously. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about Rosenthal, but still I enjoyed her high spirits, her forthright sensuality, and her sly meta-moments. There’s a very clever passage in which Peggy, a servant girl muses about the pleasures of following the lives of the nobility, and thinks about how her sisters ; “real-life problems are dull and intractable,” she notes. “Peggy didn’t see why you shouldn’t get a little amusement from people whose lives remained cozy and comfortable…” A neater apologia for romance couldn’t be penned.

So, if there’s so much to like about these books, why the reservations?

In two words, the end. The end. The cheerfully feminist, sweepingly optimistic end.

Don’t get me wrong; I know romances end with the main characters happy. I’m not against that. On the contrary, I really, really liked ramrod-straight, censorious Martha and dissipated but puppy-dog eager Toby, and Rosenthal’s Martha and Kitt as well. I wanted them to get together; I wanted them to be happy. But does everybody need to get a happy ending? The eloped couple stopped before they do anything rash; the silent, bitter former maid given her moment to confront and overawe her rapist; evil plots foiled; every couple united; the very cows singing with content. “Lady Awakened” won’t even allow any deception, no matter how prudent, to mar the march of aggressively joyful virtuousness, and so the book’s long, exquisite representation of reticence is released in a single artless confessional belch.

Again, I think I understand the appeal. The vision of love uniting everyone, the idea that romance can usher in not just personal but political utopia, is part of both books’ central message. But, for me at least, it’s just too much. My belief in the love is supposed to guarantee the utopia, but instead the unlikelihood of the utopia undermines my belief in the characters and their affection. The world just doesn’t change that easily; pretending that it does knocks me out of the fantasy and makes me depressed. Elizabeth and Darcy are real in part because Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth’s ninny of a sister are there to show that, yes, this is the world I know, where stupid people stay stupid and people have to make compromises, and not everything turns out for the best for everyone. But in “Lady Awakened” and “The Slightest Provocation”, utopia eats the characters. There, in the steady, omnipresent light, they cast no shadows, turned into flat, smiling ghosts, lobotomized advertising images selling equality and love with a blank, depersonalized cheer.

Complaining because a utopia is unrealistic is a bit pointless, I guess. And of course you could conclude that I’m not the intended audience here and leave it at that. But the thing is, I want to be the intended audience. I want the happy ending. For that matter, I find the feminist utopia appealing. I want more bitter in my sweet not because I disdain the genre pleasures, but because I crave them. Maybe, after all, these romances could use a little more of Radway’s pessimism; a little more of her second wave view of patriarchy as a bleak, not easily movable weight. I fear I need a touch of sadness and despair in order to access the joy.

I enjoyed this. I read Radway for one of my field exams, but haven’t thought about romance much since (also, romance wasn’t the point, it was more about reading a seminal cultural study of “low” culture and its reading community).

I don’t get the jab at Lethem though – one of my absolute favorite writers.

Lethem’s okay. The enthusiasm for his work is a little baffling to me.

I like Elmore Leonard too, and John LeCarre is okay. I just think Grant, who is a very fine writer, write better prose than all of them.

It’s interesting to me how utterly isolated romance is as a genre from geek culture, which is for all practical purposes mainstream culture. Sci-fi, fantasy, YA, detective, espionage — all of those are considered reasonable fodder for pop culture critics. Not romance though.

I think it’s probably because even though there has been lots of inroads in getting women to be more visible in their interest in the genres you mention that for so long were associated with men (at least in the popular imagination – in reality there is plenty of detective/crime fiction that is popular with women), there has been almost nothing in the reverse direction of those associations. Not many people write about soaps either (though some), and now that they are all but dead doing a field study of those watching habits becomes more difficult.

Especially as the face of pop-art, as represented through Lichtenstein, is appropriated from romance comics.

I grew up in a house where sci-fi wasn’t discriminated against, but romance novels were. Part of it was the uneasiness of sex, another that they couldn’t be qualified by ‘pushing the boundaries of human imagination,’ etc. It didn’t help that there wasn’t an easy entry-point from childhood– the other genres have kid-friendly versions (or are kid-friendly.) Finally, the big elephant in the room, which is that they are targeted for adult woman, but don’t take part in the nostalgizing of ‘woman’s work,’– motherhood, baking, house decorating…

You are correct that geek culture in general doesn’t seem to particularly engage with Romance as a genre. You’ll never see anything on i09.com about romance novels. In my experience SF/fantasy fans who read outside of the field seem more amenable to mysteries (and perhaps the occasional western) than to romance. That said, there is a subset of nerd culture that has indeed embraced aspects of romance fiction; in fact, the regency romances of Georgette Heyer (none of which I’ve read) are held in particular esteem by a certain subculture within book-oriented science fiction fandom who even organize “regency dances” at many SF conventions where folks engage in regency cosplay, drink tea and do historically-informed country dances. One of the conceits of Regency/Georgette Heyer fandom as I understand it is that the world that she described in her novels is so detached from our world in terms of setting, manners and snappy dialogue that it must be an alternate world, and therefore a kind of science fiction. (This reasoning is contrived, though it has a certain appeal and can be applied to all sorts of non SF/fantasy)

Re: Lethem

I find his stuff kind of hit or miss, but the stuff of his that I like, I like a lot. As with Michael Chabon (also kind of hit or miss), Lethem seems to have carved out a place for himself in both the literary fiction and SF worlds. But unlike say Iain Banks, who was differently branded depending on perceived readership (“Iain M. Banks” vs. “Iain Banks” for his SF and his “literary” books respectively) Lethem’s books aren’t so easily categorized and his perceived readership isn’t as divided, which is of interest in and of itself. The Fortress of Solitude had some pretty great parts, though I think I liked it better when one or two short sections of it were excerpted in the New Yorker as standalone short stories. 500+ pages of it got a bit tiresome. I’ve been reading collection of his short fiction Men and Cartoons recently and again, it’s pretty hit or miss, but several of the stories are genuinely great.

I read one Heyer novel a while ago; it was okay, but didn’t make me want to read a ton more.

Kailyn’s point about adult women is dead on. I didn’t really talk about it here, but both of these books are about women who have already married and are in their 30s in one case and late 20s in another.

The other thing that’s a little bizarre is how utterly divorced in terms of audience/repsectability rom-coms are from romance novels. Sci-fi book/movie/comic fandom seems pretty continuous, but while movie critics will write about rom coms, and they’re considered a mainstream genre, romance novels remain resolutely niche (though niche with a quite big following, I believe.)

Also bizarre that the big current crossover phenomena, 50 Shades, is such utter and complete crap.

I’m really glad you read the books and took them seriously. I don’t remember our conversation on Twitter that well, but I believe I recommended them for a different reason than the one you state above. It wasn’t my intention that they counter Radway’s assertion that the romance genre involves nurturing, or to illustrate that it doesn’t have a utopian aspect.

Indeed I agree that there is a fair amount of nurturing that goes on in the genre (I think that’s only to be expected in a genre about romantic love). I agree too that romance is a genre that deals with the best of all possible worlds, and that therefore the endings can be difficult for writers to pull off successfully.

It’s easy to make the endings too neat and orderly, or else unconvincing. If there is too much conflict in the couple’s relationship, readers may not believe the relationship really will last, and if there is too little conflict — well, that can be boring or sugary.

A well-crafted romance is therefore a lot more difficult to write than it may appear to be at first glance. Neither of the books I recommended is perfect, but I am glad you were able to appreciate that there was real craftsmanship at work in them. I think that, more than anything else, was the reason I recommended those specific books to you.

Your article in Salon initially struck me as dismissive of the romance genre. You used the word “forumla” which does have a negative connotation to many people. As I said on Twitter, I prefer to describe genre fiction with a word like “framework” or even “recipe” which doesn’t come with as much baggage.

I thought the Salon article portrayed romance as a genre that was suffering from stale sameness until self-publishing came along and introduced porn into the equation. And while it is true that there is a lot of sameness in romance (as there is in any genre), there is also freshness and inventiveness in some corners of the genre — including among traditionally published books — and that is where I (a writer of romance as well as a reviewer for a popular romance reviews blog) was trying to point you by recommending that you try these books.

With regard to Radway, when I read her book Reading the Romance many years ago, I felt that she didn’t have much regard for the readers she interviewed, and that she drew broad conclusions based on a very small sample of readers.

So for example while I agree with Radway and with you that the protagonists of a romance nurture one another, I don’t agree that (as Radway’s study states) this is because romance readers aren’t nurtured by their husbands or their mothers. I think that is a huge assumption to make and the fact that she draws a conclusion based on it leads me to take her work a lot less seriously than you do.

Romance, like any other genre, has a lot of weak books and fewer strong ones. You have to sort the wheat from the chaff when you read anything, and because there are so many more books published in romance than there are in any other genre, there is more chaff to search through.

Some of us find that search rewarding, others don’t — but I would ask those who don’t not to dismiss an entire genre on the basis of its weakest books, unless they are willing to judge their own genres of choice (and I include literary fiction here) by that same criteria.

Nicely done. My sense is that there’s some play with the conventions of the genre in both endings that you might be missing, just through lack of familiarity with those conventions. The final scenes of two of my favorite romances, _Welcome to Temptation_ by Jennifer Crusie and _Natural Born Charmer_ by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, are utterly utopian, but the narrative plays with that “flattening” in ways it took me several years of romance-reading to appreciate. (Ditto the shift into fable at the end of _Flowers from the Storm_, by Laura Kinsale, which is a marvelous book.)

In terms of scholarship, I hope you’ll swing by the peer-reviewed Journal of Popular Romance Studies (http://jprstudies.org) and take a look at the recent anthology _New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction_. A lot of good new work on the genre out there, from a variety of perspectives, including literary close reading.

Hey Janine! Thanks for commenting. Looking back at the article, I think I actually said that you recommended the books because you thought they’d challenge Radway, not particularly focusing on the nurturance issue. The nurturance issue is just what I’m interested in re: Radway (at least at the moment.)

I think my point in the Salon article wasn’t that all romances are staid, but that self-publishing seems to have allowed romance themes and issues to be addressed in different ways (through babysitter porn, for example.)

I think Radway is actually arguing *against* the idea that Romance is antifeminist, and that the people who read it are fools. She seems to quite admire many of the women she interviewed. I think she is skeptical of the genre in some ways, and never really is willing to talk about her own reaction to or investment in the genre, which makes her appear as an outsider looking in and judging, which can be condescending. I do think she has interesting insights, though, and I don’t think condescension is her only, or even her primary, way of thinking about the genre or the people who read it.

I think there’s some play in the Rosenthal (making the declaration of love part of a performance is definitely a wink.) The Grant ending may be playing, but it’s hard for me to see any way that I can read it as not being terrible. After the bulk of the book being so good, it’s really a let down. The careful pacing, characterization, and period detail are all just chucked.

The utopian ending actually makes me think that Tabico’s porn insect apocalypse story is in a lot of ways a romance, though.

I’m fascinated by the introduction of Regency into conventions. It makes perfect sense. The treatment of it as a parallel world/fantasy is so insightful.

Today, I think more and more why romance is excluded from sic-fi/fantasy consideration is that it doesn’t have a nostalgic base from which geek community arises. These books are targeted to adult female readers– there’s not much of an entry point for young males. But I think the expansion of female ‘geekdom’ (or increasing openness of it,) has brought in other, more feminine ‘nostalgias’ like anime and Jane Austen. And then you suddenly have Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Enjoyed this post, Noah. (And also Janine’s comment!) I’m with you on the endings… sometimes you just want to shake up the happily ever after.

This has me thinking about all the romance/erotica stories being published in sections now. While sequels and trilogies aren’t new and can make sense from a marketing/profit standpoint, it’s a bit different from the trend I had been accustomed to, when a romance author draws several novels from the same fictional universe, i.e. a family with three brothers leads to one book about each brother. One of the (perhaps?) unintended consequences is that the early books end with a better combination of the bitter/sweet (sometimes as a cliff hanger, sometimes not). So writers are forced to find alternative forms of closure, which can make things more interesting.

>>>Don’t get me wrong; I know romances end with the main characters happy. I’m not against that.

I see there’s all this talk of utopian worlds/relationships and happy endings. I’m not an expert on the romance genre but this seems like a small subsection of the romance genre (Western-American?). Just like superheroes seem like the entirety of comics to outsiders.

The romance genre in Asia does not consist of uniformly happy endings. In fact, the most popular TV romances often have tragic endings. Tragedy makes romance more real.

I will say that American primetime TV is shockingly bereft of both romance and even engaging depictions of friendship. There is lust, sex, and supposed claims of friendship but the last time I saw real quality bonding on American primetime TV was probably the relationship between Alicia and Kalinda on The Good Wife.

I think there’s something of a semantic problem here; “romance” as a genre in this context is usually/often taken to mean in particular romance genre novels. There is not necessarily a shortage of tragic romances, but they (often) get defined out of the genre (for instance, Atonement has a heart-breaking tragic romance, but is usually thought of as lit-fic, not romance — in part I think because it doesn’t have a happy ending.)

Yeah – but you would have to narrow that down even further to “Western Romance Genre Novels.” I’m vaguely familiar with those – my first was something by Barbara Cartland which I read as a kid.

This description doesn’t work in Asia. An example: the biggest (I mean tens of millions of viewers all over Asia) Chinese TV romance from 2011-12 was this thing called Scarlet Heart. It was based on a hit e-book (later printed) by a Chinese authoress who specializes in historical romances. If you had to view it through the lens of anime/manga, it would be described as part of the harem romance genre. As in many men pining after one woman. Not even remotely considered lit-fic though she’s quite a reasonable writer as far as I can tell. This one was set during the Qing dynasty. It was read and watched by tons of women and men. And it had a big tear jerking tragic ending.

Noah, do you really think those passages are well-written? To me, both moments from Grant reek of cuteness/cleverness, but show nothing interesting stylistically — unless you like passages where you can just feel the writer trying (without the payoff of anything particularly exquisite).

The piece about the seashell, for example, not only seems to fall apart in its own right (shells are curled tight? protective shells are also brittle? that clunky ending of being “all the way inside”?), but it also undermines the only nice part of the previous image — that nicely understated bit about how “her hands fell at random places.” (Balled fists don’t fall passively.) Almost everything she needed was right there, and then plop (an explanation), plop (an ugly simile), plop (a counteracting simile, suddenly straining for beauty). Just stop already.

Then again, it sounds like what I think of when I think about writing in romances.

This has come up before I think — you tend not to like the writing I do. I don’t really see why balled fists cant’ fall passively, and I think ugly similes are appropriate for bad sex — and yes, I like the ugliness and awkwardness of it, which seems pretty clearly deliberate and appropriate. I like the alliteration too, and don’t really see why “all the way inside” is clunky.

Are you a Hemingway fan, by chance? You seem to have a less is more aesthetic in these matters which I don’t really share.

A style I can appreciate: “Peggy didn’t see why you *shouldn’t* get a little amusement from people whose lives remained cozy and comfortable…” A nice and breezy bit of free indirect discourse, with a servant’s view and a servant’s language seeping into the third-person narrative, jostling up nicely against the more patrician “intractable.”

(That last comment came before I read your reply, Noah. I hope to return to the conversation later, but I can say that I think “In Our Time” is, for the most part, insanely strong writing. But I tend to love ornately, complexly beautiful prose just as strongly. And I think there is a real beauty in that well-turned moment from Rosenthal. Of course, making judgments based on one or two sentences is something one would only dare to do in a comments thread.)

Great article, Noah. I take your point about the endings of the novels. The unrelenting happiness of romance endings can sometimes be a bit much, which is why I’ll read a ton of them (I highly recommend Lisa Kleypas or Sarah macLean, if you like British historicals), but then have to take a break. That said, one of the things I like best about black romance, particularly black historicals, is the ever-present tension between the genre’s demand for the happy ending and the reader’s knowledge of black history. The reader knows how much longer slavery will go on, what happens to all-black towns in Kansas, that the Native Americans eventually lose nearly everything, and, yet, authors manage to still craft emotionally satisfying stories that never deny those facts.

Really like Beverly Jenkins! Conseula’s suggestions are terrific; one of her first “Indigo” is also good when it comes to capturing those tensions between the genre’s conventions and black history, although it may be out of print.

That same balance between the resolution of the local love story and the broader, unsolvable problems of history shows up in a lot of m/m historical romances. Alex Beecroft’s Age of Sail novel “False Colors” is a beautifully written example. Very haunting, poignant final page or two, and just a crackerjack book all around.

Qiana–Indigo is great. I think Jenkins brought it back to print as a self-published book. I’m pretty sure you can get it as an e-book for Kindle or Nook. And Eric–I haven’t read any professional m/m historicals, but the best m/m fanfiction historicals make similar use of this kind of tension.

Today, I think more and more why romance is excluded from sic-fi/fantasy consideration is that it doesn’t have a nostalgic base from which geek community arises. These books are targeted to adult female readers– there’s not much of an entry point for young males. But I think the expansion of female ‘geekdom’ (or increasing openness of it,) has brought in other, more feminine ‘nostalgias’ like anime and Jane Austen.

I read a science fiction novel recently called The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord which was essentially thinly-disguised Star Trek fan fiction of the “Mary Sue” sort, with our narrator gradually becoming involved with a Spock-like character in a Federation-esque universe. Despite the Trek/SF trappings that drive the plot, it’s essentially a romance story and judging from the Amazon reviews, it seems to have struck a chord with some readers, but I found it pretty lightweight.

More could be said about the role of fan fiction in mixing some of the sensibilities of the romance genre to SF/fantasy settings and situations.